Gris-Gris Gumbo and Mrs. Charles Bukowski at the Mardi Gras Detox Centre

THEORY I. A body at rest tends to remain at rest

Six weeks. The doctor was clear. David Plumber would be in a coma for six weeks, then die, just like that. Kaput. Maybe that started his latest binge. It was ugly news for any man, and Plumber took it particularly hard. He’d never seen it coming. He’d just signed a new contract, two years with a two-year option. He wasn’t ready to die. He’d rather move to Siberia.

The clinic had been his father’s idea. Dad had struggled on and off with booze for years and knew the signs. Dad insisted, Dave resisted. He was too handsome to be a drunk. But then when he got the death sentence — six weeks — he relented. It was the mechanical inevitability of existence. What could you do?

Plumber quickly understood why actors were always checking themselves into these places. First of all, the coverage was great. Lilly really did a great job there. She must have been working the phones 24-7. Every major tab did something, and the stories were uniformly sympathetic.¹ People was talking cover. They’d already sent a guy round to shoot it: Plumber nearly unconscious in a hospital bed,² Dad posed grimly in the background, holding his son’s hand. Both looking haggard and handsome,³ an effect produced with harsh cross lighting and a special filter, which added a curious grainy texture to the final print. Kudos to the shooter, he really knew his stuff. But it wasn’t just the coverage; the atmosphere suited Plumber. It was actor heaven, everyone paying attention to him all the time. Talk about falling into a part. He was intuitively into it. All he had to do was show up, say some lines, whatever came into his head, really, and everyone seemed tremendously pleased. Dad was a bit of a pill — he always was, you’d almost think he was the one with six weeks left to live — and of course all that stuff with Nancy. But all in all things were good. Life, in fact, couldn’t get much better.

THEORY II: A straight line is the shortest distance between two pints

The last binge started like this. Plumber out for a walk, completely innocent. In fact, he’d left his apartment to get away from all the temptations it contained: the liquor cabinet (empty but inviting), the phone (Dad could be calling again at any minute to check up), and the general air of nothingness — that nameless boredom that Plumber could not stand. He was the kind of person who just couldn’t sit there alone with himself, with his thoughts, with his memories. It left him in a panic. He had to do something, and over time, through a process of trial and error,⁴ he’d found that booze filled the void quite nicely.⁵ So when Goldberg called Plumber to tell him he had six weeks to live, Plumber looked at the liquor cabinet, the phone and the void and decided that a stroll was in order, if not to deliver him from temptation, at least to delay it a little. Everything was fine until he took a wrong turn and passed a bar offering Glenmorangie eighteen-year-old high-land single malt for five bucks a shot. Obviously fate was interceding; he’d have been insane to pass it up.

The first drink was no problem. He ordered it calmly, as a man only passing through for a single social single malt might do, and accepted it with such nonchalance that the waitress might have thought he’d changed his mind about a drink after all. Plumber tried to sip, God knows he did, but found himself gobbling the drink down, as much as any man can gobble a drink. The warm wave washed over him and covered him like a comfortable watery blanket, and Plumber was on to the next drink and the next before he knew what hit him. That’s when the camera shut off. The director in his head called cut, and his brain took five for who knows how long. Days? At least.⁶ The next thing he remembered was waking up in Goldberg’s guest bedroom, the door bolted from the outside, in a pair of pee-soaked pyjamas, in the clutch of a pee-soaked mattress, covered with a ragged pee-soaked quilt, feeling deeply, if not urgently, the need to pee.

He’d made it to work, Goldberg had seen to that, and had apparently done quite well. All that was asked of him was that he lie in a bed looking hideous and fitful, but still, he pulled it off with unconscious aplomb. In fact Plumber’s popularity seemed to have soared. The phone lines had been jammed by viewers concerned with the state of his health. This was Plumber’s greatest fear. They didn’t want him to go. Maim him. Cripple him. Leave him a living vegetable. Just don’t kill him. The dying he could handle, it was the lingering he wasn’t keen on. He had a friend who’d played Blaise, the evil twin on Santa Clara Nights. The producers had him run over by a horse-drawn carriage; the doctors gave him two weeks to live. It was the longest two weeks of his life. He lingered for four full seasons before suddenly, miraculously regaining consciousness. Four years of dragging his hump to work, punching the clock, getting paid for pretending to be on death’s door five minutes a week. It was work. It paid the bills. But it wasn’t art and it wasn’t even craft. The poor bastard left the show the following year, depressed and disillusioned.⁷ In Plumber’s case the worst part was that the producers must have known it was coming. Levitz and Sherwood must have offered to renew his contract early because they wanted to lock him up on To the Ends of the Earth. They knew that other soaps were calling, and it’s a cinch Goldberg would have bolted in a second if he knew his client would be spending six weeks — an eternity, surely — unconscious and drooling, growing older and less marketable as each week-long second ticked past.

Dad arrived mid-stream as Plumber was enjoying what might have been the most satisfyingly, bladder-soothing pee of his life. Dad had a stuffed duffel bag in one hand and a large bottle of Evian in the other. “Any blood?” Dad moved closer to inspect Plumber’s urine. “All clear.” He sounded upset. He was the kind of man who thrived on crisis, who in fact could barely function unless there was a crisis to react to, who in fact, not to stress the point too finely, would go out of his way to create chaos with almost biblical precision out of the day-to-day nothingness of existence. Simple example: Dad moved more often than some men⁸ changed relationships. On average, three times a year. He’d be in one apartment or another and then, without warning, give notice. A few weeks later, he’d be setting up house in a new place, subconsciously plotting his next foray into the void. On the one hand, Plumber understood this as a kind of quasi-spiritual quest, or rather, an anti-quasi-spiritual quest, an example of his father’s ongoing search to find peace of mind in his surroundings. But just as important, the moves ensured that Dad’s life was in constant flux. So the What, the chaos, was easy to figure, but the Why — the Why had Plumber puzzled. And there was no sense asking Dad about it. He was a walking recessive gene, emotionally speaking, who’d evolved past the alcoholism and then hit a brick wall.

Plumber: So, Dad, I want to ask you about the chaos.

Dad: What chaos is that, son?

Plumber: You know, the overwhelming chaos wherein you live your life.

Dad: I’m not sure I follow you.

Plumber: Okay, let me put it this way. If you were to live your life in a constant state of chaos — theoretically speaking — do you think you’d be doing it out of a sense of comfort, because maybe you grew up in a chaotic home and longed to return to some kind of blissful, familiar disorder? Or do you think you’d be doing it as a kind of distraction, to take your mind off higher matters of philosophical importance — life, death, the meaning of existence and so forth? In other words, do you think you’d be trading one addiction, alcohol, for another, chaos? Or is it possible that you’d be extracting a certain sense of power from it, the desperate machismo of the self-generated messiah, leading yourself from the wilderness of complacency into a funhouse-mirror promised land? Or could it simply be that you wouldn’t know any better? This is how you’ve always lived your life — theoretically speaking — and this is how you will continue?

Dad: Sorry. I’m still not sure I follow.

Plumber: Then answer this: why did she leave?

Dad: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.⁹

The purpose of the stuffed duffel bag was quickly explained. Dad was doing an “intervention” with Goldberg’s blessing and support.¹⁰ Dad had been to more than one intervention in his day¹¹ and knew the drill. Confront the victim with his problem, give him the ol’ man in the mirror routine, offer an empathic word or two, hug (required), cry (optional), then hand the poor sod his bag¹² and push him into an awaiting limousine. Failure — which in this case meant measured response and careful consideration — was not an option.

Fast forward to Plumber, showered and dressed, strapped in the back of a stretch limo, packed bag in lap,¹³ Evian in hand, airport bound. He’d succumbed willingly, all things considered. Of course, he’d resisted, everybody does. Dad’s hugging and crying¹⁴ did little to undermine his resolve, and even Goldberg’s tough love (“I can’t spend all my time babysitting you, I have other clients” ¹⁵) failed to move Plumber. The young man wasn’t arguing with the facts. He knew he had a problem, although he did dispute how that problem was characterized and even maintained that, at this precise moment in his life, his problem was as much a solution. And maybe he never would have gotten in the limo if it hadn’t been for a timely phone call from Nancy, who said that if he got treatment maybe, just maybe, she’d talk to him. Isn’t love strange?

THEORY III. The acceleration of an assumption is directly proportional to the force exerted on that assumption

So, we go through life burdened by false assumptions. Plumber, for one, had some odd ideas. His unattractiveness. That’s a curious bit. Practically the entire world telling him how handsome he was, strange women¹⁶ stopping him on the street and offering to perform unsolicited and, in some cases, truly complex sex acts on him, and still nada on the self-perception scale. The child psychiatrist¹⁷ had pegged him early: low self esteem. Go figure. Practically the entire day-time-TV-watching country thinking Plumber was one of the finest pieces of man flesh ever to strut across the face of the earth, while inside he seeing himself as a repulsive smudge with a seashell lip and asymmetrical eyes and ears too big for his too-small head. Maybe that’s why he drank, to mask the ugliness he felt inside. Or perhaps to wallpaper over the unresolved conflict of his parents’ divorce and his mother’s subsequent and o’er-hasty suicide. Of course, this is just another assumption, the belief that people — you and I, say — do things out of emotional need. Certainly Dr. Prock assumed as much when he treated the young David Plumber, years ago. Back then, alcohol wasn’t the problem. Back then, Plumber was addicted to school, or more precisely, Plumber was addicted to not going to school. Maybe it happened gradually, Plumber couldn’t remember exactly now, but he does remember a point when he was going to school and then a point when he wasn’t going to school, and nothing anyone said or did would make him go. The shrink pegged it as an emotional problem, which to David’s young mind was about as useful as saying the night sky was black. Dad had handled it all right, though. Dad had learned that while time didn’t necessarily heal all wounds (in fact, David Plumber Sr. would tell you the inverse was true), there was never a bad excuse for a holiday. He took young David on extensive bus trips, to folk festivals in the Ozarks and Newfoundland, to arctic-circle fish camps with nonsense names several dozen syllables long. Mostly, he took his son to the movies. Lots and lots of movies. Dad said he was studying. Dad said he was the luckiest man in the world because to learn his craft he didn’t need to study textbooks; it was all up there for him to learn, on the silver screen. So there Plumber the Younger sat, fifteen going on sixteen, inwardly ugly, unattended and unattending, diagnosed Paranoid Neurotic School Phobic with Underlying Depressive Tendencies, assumed by most everyone¹⁸ in his little town to be wildly fucking up, alone in the dark but surrounded, studying and learning too, and slowly working his way to becoming the most famous, handsomest man ever to come out of Bradenton, California.¹⁹ The irony was lost on everyone.

THEORY IV. All objects are accelerated equally by the force of authority

The Mardi Gras Detox Centre had three rules etched in a bullet-proof, shatter-proof window that separated the guest foyer from the clinic per se.

1. Everyone gets out alive.

2. To forgive is holy; to forgive yourself, divine.

3. One day at a time.

This last rule had achieved corporate sponsor status at the clinic. The counsellors (jeans, sneakers and, as a rule, earthtone sweaters) and nurses (jeans, sensible shoes and, as a rule, pastel smocks) used the expression compulsively, leaving Plumber to wonder if they weren’t all part of some complicated royalty sharing scheme. Within the first hour after admission, Plumber heard the phrase used to admonish a teenaged girl who was refusing to make her bed²⁰ (“Someone’s not feeling very one-day-at-a-time today, is she?”), calm two prepubescent dotcom billionaires arguing over a disputed line call in table tennis (“You can’t respect your one-day-at-a-time unless you respect other people’s one-day-at-a-time”) and praise an old bum²¹ who’d successfully swallowed his medication (“See? One pill at a time and one day at a time. It’s that simple”). Plumber was a quick study.

Counsellor A: We treat a lot of celebrities here. I just want you to know that you can’t expect to be treated differently from the other patients.

Plumber: I understand. I just want to take things one day at a time.

Counsellor A: That’s the right approach. You’ve got your work cut out for you, but if you just take it one day at a time, it’ll go a lot easier.

Plumber: One day at a time?

Counsellor A: Yes. One day at a time.

The first days of treatment were not bad. Plumber was put on a strict diet — lots of water and fresh fruit — and confined to his room and the exercise yard. The sudden abstinence didn’t hit him, a career binger, as hard as it might some. He’d glimpsed the worst of the lot,²² those patients in the cheap seats, the semi-private rooms and wards in the east wing of the centre, strapped to their real aluminum hospital beds, frothing and howling and crying like the worst Emmy-conscious hack in the cheesiest made-for-TV MOTW. Plumber was amazed to see real drunks act this way. They must have been the hard core, the superdrunks, who’d transcended ordinary drunkenness and addiction and landed on a higher lower plane, the mythic realm of the DTs. Plumber silently applauded their tenacity. In a world organized to help them, a culture which in fact orbited the diseased and miserable like an obedient, dependent satellite, these drunks had persevered. Kudos all round.

THEORY V. For every inaction there is an equal and opposite contraction

One the third day, the nurse stood with arms folded, blocking Plumber’s exit. She’d just appeared, an uncouth vision. It had been his refusal to go to group that seemed to summon her from the depths of the darkest nurses’ station. Group was mandatory, she informed Plumber. Option was not an option.

She stared for a long time without speaking. Plumber couldn’t tell if she was really angry or simply reaching into her patient-motivation bag of tricks. It was effective in either case; Plumber enjoyed watching a professional at work.

“I’m not going to pick you up and carry you there.”

“Try again tomorrow. I’m, like, too one-day-at-a-time today.” Plumber smiled and shifted on his bed. It was basic physics at work. An irresistible force coming up against an immovable object.²³ The nurse stood in place, breathing deeply, trying, Plumber supposed, to calm herself. She was taking her role much too seriously. What were her options? Would she kick him out? No. The clinic needed high profile cases like Plumber to keep the cheap seats full. Would she cut off his privileges? Not likely, since it was the privileges that kept his cute butt in the centre, helping to drum up business. A vicious circle.

“I don’t want to have to call the orderlies.” She spoke with the empty authority of someone who had survived a lifetime of assertiveness training seminars.

“Good. I don’t want you to have to call them.” He wasn’t being cheeky,²⁴ although it no doubt sounded that way. He really didn’t want her to call the orderlies.²⁵ Almost as soon as he said the words, though, he regretted them. He’d painted both of them into a corner. You learn this kind of thing at theatre school,²⁶ how to pace a scene to move toward an end-point. The key was listening, always listening. If you weren’t listening, truly listening, to the other actors, if you were only paying attention to your own lines, then you wouldn’t react properly. That was the key, reactions, because despite the name — acting — the craft was really all about reacting. Clearly, then, Plumber hadn’t been listening; he’d been too I-focused and not eye-focused.²⁷ He’d been acting, not reacting, and now he was nine-tenths through a scene without an ending in sight. He wanted to start again, but life, as the counsellors were wont to tell him, was not a dress rehearsal. So there they sat, neither giving an inch, the nurse growing angrier as each second sauntered past, and Plumber — Plumber even more handsome than usual, noticeable more thirsty, wishing that he’d begun better so he could end well, but most of all impatient. When was Nancy coming? She should have been there by now.

THEORY VI. Beauty is skin deep, but ugly goes right to the bone

They called her Mrs. Charles Bukowski, Plumber and Roy.²⁸ Not to her face. That would have been rude. Plumber and Roy were not rude. Roy²⁹ was an actor too, and he’d sort of latched onto Plumber in the way that less successful actors (lawyers, dentists, writers) tended to latch on to more successful actors (lawyers, dentists, writers).³⁰ Maybe they hoped that some of the magic would rub off, or that they might catch the financial and emotional drips? In any case, Plumber didn’t mind. Roy was okay to talk to, just one of the guys. Maybe a little too skinny to be trusted, with bit player features: big head, small black eyes, thin lips. Not too handsome. A good side-kick. Plus, he’d somehow³¹ smuggled some smoke into the centre and was disposed to sharing it in the exercise yard.³² That’s where and how they first met, in the exercise yard over a joint. They soon had the giggles. And then they spotted her, seated in a folding lawn chair by the fountain. She wore a pink housecoat with pink pyjamas underneath and pink furry slippers like the ones Plumber’s mother, God rest her soul, might have worn. They giggled some more. Who said it first? Plumber was not sure. Maybe they both said it at the same time — certainly they both thought it at the same time. Mrs. Charles Bukowski.

The resemblance was breathtaking, which only made it funnier. Not that she was ugly. Just that she was the kind of woman who’d never once been beautiful in her life, not even for a second.³³ Halt. Maybe once. Maybe for a moment some days after birth, after the ugly-inducing trauma of that event had washed off and before the dissymmetry of her young life had begun to weigh on her face, pulling it apart, separating her countenance forever from the land mass of beauty. It wasn’t so much that she’d never been beautiful, there were entire English villages which shared that burden without apparent ill effect, but more that she’d never felt beautiful. Every woman on earth deserved that, if only for a moment. Every woman on earth deserved to feel beautiful, which means, Plumber supposed, feel themselves an object of beauty, feel themselves gazed upon — by a parent, a friend, a lover — with adoration and, where appropriate, stylized lust. Even in the least relative terms, beauty was fleeting, and eventually every woman³⁴ was reduced to mourning lost youth, lost beauty. This woman — she would never know that sad charm. Never, never quite ugly, never beautiful. An entire life on a folding lawn chair, in pink slippers, by a fountain.

Then there were the boils. Plumber thought that was the word for them. Bumps on her face and her hands. On a much older woman, a grandmother, they wouldn’t be worth a second look, in fact they’d add character.³⁵ But on her, so young, so unbeautiful, they were painful. They puffed up her already puffed face, casting little shadows on her pale skin. The boils boiled even along her hairline, where the skin ridged the bright red hair.

So one of them said it first. Mrs. Charles Bukowski. Then they both laughed. They laughed and laughed and laughed, laughing so hard that Plumber actually slapped his knee, again and again, and finally snorted, just like his mother used to snort whenever she laughed too much. That made them laugh some more. They laughed until Roy fell off his chair, fell off his chair and onto the ground, where he lay curled up, holding his stomach from laughing so hard, and laughed and laughed until he farted so loud he scared off a couple of pigeons that had lighted on a branch nearby. Roy farted so loud Plumber’s chair shook. Then they laughed some more.

THEORY VII. The length of a body contracts as humiliation increases

The woman knew they were laughing at her.³⁶ Plumber could tell by the way she shifted in her seat, uncrossing her legs and crossing them again. She probably wanted to get up and leave. But that would signal defeat. That would acknowledge that the assholes were winning.

THEORY VIII. The mediocre are the message

Life? Now was that a cool medium or a hot one?³⁷ Plumber had read Understanding Media from start to finish six times and read it again when he got into the Mardi Gras Detox Centre. In truth he never understood it,³⁸ but little things, useful tidbits, he picked up. Television. Was that cool? Never be hot on a cool medium. A good rule of thumb. Film. Hot, as he recalled. Direct to video (it could be assumed): cool. Books — literature — were surprisingly hot, were they not? But what of sex?³⁹ And love?⁴⁰ What of truth and beauty?⁴¹ What of life? Where did life fit into McLuhan’s scheme? He’d planned to ask Nancy that, but her promised visit never materialized.⁴² Instead he had Dad. Dad, overcome with the sudden urge to impart fatherly wisdom.

Voice A: The secret to life is not a secret. Simple blind acceptance, that’s all that’s needed.

Voice B: Did she say why?

Voice A: It’s funny, but all that square stuff you hear growing up? It all turns out to be true. You Get Out of Life What You Put In. Respect Yourself. All Things Come to Those Who Wait.

Voice B: She’s been saying all week she was going to come.

Voice A: But the worst thing you can do is blame yourself. You can’t turn back the clock. You Can’t Turn Back the Clock. Everyone makes mistakes. It’s time to take action. It’s time to move on.

Voice B: I don’t understand. You’d think a woman, a wife, would visit. Why wouldn’t she visit?

Voice A: Sometimes you just have to move on.

Voice B: What’s wrong with me?⁴³

Voice A: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.

Voice B: That’s your answer to everything.

Voice A: Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point?

Voice B: No. Moving on.

Dad patted his hand as he might have done when Plumber was a boy. “There, there, there, son. One day at a time. You’ve got to take things one day at a time.” Dad stood up, he looked around like a man looking for his hat.⁴⁴ Then he left.

THEORY IX. The distance between two bodies is directly proportional to the previous intimacy

Day fifteen. Plumber does not get out of bed. He spends the morning throwing up into a bucket and the afternoon in his four-poster unable to budge. The nurses see this as a good sign. The body throwing off its poisons, the cells, chemically altered by the ongoing exposure to alcohol, realigning themselves, dutiful planets. In the evening, Plumber cannot sleep. Eventually he has to be restrained by orderlies as the night nurse injects him with Valium. Still Plumber wards off sleep. He lies strapped to his bed, moaning. He expects hallucinations, but they never come. He closes his eyes and hopes to dream of Nancy.⁴⁵ But when he finally falls asleep, he dreams of nothing at all.

THEORY IX, restated: Gravity is directly proportional to mass and inversely proportional to distance.

When Plumber finally came to his senses, he was strapped to a metal bed in the ICU. He mouth tasted like a raccoon’s nest, his brain had a charley horse. His lips were so dry he had to pry them apart with his tongue. Mrs. Charles Bukowski was strapped to the next bed. She looked like Death with an attitude. Like Death on a bender. Like Death after losing the Daytime Emmy for Best Performance by Death to some young upstart Death for the seventh year running. Like Death after His wife and mistress had just run off together to set up house in Iceland: cold, cold Iceland. Snot oozed along the tube in Mrs. Charles Bukowski’s nose. A white paste of spittle surrounded her mouth. Each time she inhaled, her body was shaken by a thunderous snore. Imagine waking up to that every morning.⁴⁶ The folds of her hospital PJs had fallen open, and Plumber could follow the vein-splattered contour of her skin from her neck to her belly. One large boob hung out, artfully arranged across her arm, the huge, huge nipple engorged in sleep, her silver-dollar-pancake-sized aureole, her truck-tire-nipple-sized nipple engorged asexually, artfully. Even aroused, she was not arousing. All subject, no object. Plumber studied her. He was thinking about inner beauty and wondering seriously if it was true, as the ancients believed, that the surface was a genuine reflection of the depth. Was an ugly woman ugly inside? Was her heart ugly? Was her soul ugly? Did she, as the ancients believed, have ugly thoughts and ugly corpuscles? And conversely, were beautiful people really beautiful inside and out? But no. Surely our inner life registered our reaction to circumstance rather than simple circumstance. Beauty, he reasoned, could be found in even the least beautiful objects: Arbus’s freaks; Mapplethorpe’s plundered assholes.

Plumber wanted to scratch his lip, but his arms were gently strapped to the bed.⁴⁷

It was the scar. The shell-shaped scar in the middle of his upper lip. The only reminder of an incomplete palate, surgically repaired in infancy. Plumber wriggled his lips, trying to scratch the half-vortex, the parenthetical mark, with his teeth. He managed to raise his shoulder to his mouth. Everything has its imperfections. Even beauty.

Mrs. Charles Bukowski gasped suddenly and opened her eyes. Plumber smiled wanly. She stared at him for almost a minute, perhaps allowing her eyes to adjust to the light.

“Where the fuck am I?”

“We’re in intensive care, I think.”

“Who the fuck are you?”

“I’m —”

“And what the fuck are you looking at?”

Plumber turned his head as the woman started screaming for the nurse. Perhaps they’d sedate her, she seemed nearly hysterical. Perhaps they’d sedate him. There were rules, he supposed, about looking into the soul of the person beside you.⁴⁸

HYPOTHESIS A. If love is blind, then lust really needs glasses

Plumber was having a lucid moment. In the exercise yard, the sun setting right on time, waiting for his father, already late.

“We were talking about anger.”

“No. We were talking about men.”

“Same thing.” Roy took a big toke, enjoying the role of devil’s advocate. “The point is that the emotional entry —”

“What the hell is that?”

“The emotional entry, you know, the context. The place where emotions begin and end. It’s always hot for a man. For a woman —”

“Cold?”

“Precisely.”

“Which means?”

“Men are a hot medium. We demand engagement.”

“And women are a cold medium?”

Plumber nodded.

“Well, my girlfriend is demanding engagement, and she’s definitely hot.”

“Now you’re mincing words.”

“I thought that’s was the point.”

“We’re having an intelligent discussion.”

“Same thing.”

“I’ll give you an example. My wife says I don’t know how to express my quote unquote feelings. She says that’s the problem with me, with men. That we don’t know how to express our quote unquote feelings. But I say I do know how to express my feelings, but it just so happens that most of the feelings I want to express are not the ones she wants me to express. I get pissed off. I get angry. I get horny. I get happy when the Dodgers win, I get unhappy when they lose.”

“It’s an old story.”

“Timeless.”

“But what has it to do with relative temperature?”

“Well, that’s my point. My quote unquote feelings are dependent on circumstance. I have to look outside for my emotional . . .”

“Cues?”

“Thank you. Cues. While women, most women, evaluate the world solely on what’s going on inside . . .”

“Women’s intuition.”

“That’s part of it. But I’m talking more about the shape of their emotional substance . . .”

“You’re losing me here.”

“You know: what informs their emotion, or better, what informs their interpretation of their emotions.”

“Huh?”

“For example, I say ‘I’m going out,’ and she says ‘Fine, go out.’ But when I come home she says, ‘Where the hell were you?’ and I say ‘Out,’ and then she shuts up and goes to the bedroom and closes the door. I find her there a few minutes later, crying. It’s got nothing to do with external circumstance, it’s just that I happened to go out at a point when she was feeling vulnerable, and when I said ‘I’m going out,’ she heard ‘I don’t love you anymore.’ The point is, their emotional context is cold because it is completely internal and is almost entirely dependant on whether or not a woman is feeling particularly loved at a given point in time and space. Our emotional context is hot because it is external, based on our reaction to an observable, for lack of a better term, reality. That’s why all the greatest scientists are men, and the great sex therapists are women.”

Roy took a long toke. The cherry glowed red hot in the darkness.

“Plumber, you’re a genius,” he said, after much consideration.

“Thank you, Roy. I try. In my humble way, I try.”

A wave of nausea washed over Plumber, and he barfed into his own lap. Roy called for the orderly. Plumber dropped to his hands and knees and barfed again, spewing almost nothing but air. Roy called for the orderly again as the woman in the bushes, hitherto unnoticed, shifted slightly to get a better view.

. . .

HYPOTHESIS B. If object a orbits planet ß, then ß really has its work cut out

“Why did you leave Mom?”

“Why?”

“We’ve been discussing our families in group.”

“Really? What did you say about me?”

“I said that you were handsome. I said that you once played the voice of a fish . . .”

“Crustacean, actually.”

“I said that you were indecisive. In fact I said that you were positively definitive in your indecisiveness. And I told the story of how, when I was ten and first came to live with you, you made us both sleep on the pullout couch even though there were two perfectly good, albeit unfurnished, bedrooms in the apartment. And how we moved in two weeks later with that woman in the Marines . . . ”

“An actress, really. She only played a Marine on TV.”

“Well, she might as well have been a Marine, the way she barked commands at us. I told group how she used to make us line up by our beds in our underwear for inspection, and how the coin had to bounce off the bed before we were allowed to move on to breakfast, and how she wouldn’t let you drive to work because she thought you needed the exercise, and how her mother with the limp and the moustache came to live with us, and you and I wound up sleeping, again, on the pullout couch, and how three weeks later we were on the move again. I told them how that’s not your real hair, and how you spent your entire inheritance getting your teeth capped, and about the time you decided to save money on a Christmas tree and took me up north to cut our own, but then how the cops caught us and you had to pay a five-hundred-dollar fine, which wound up being the most expensive Christmas tree you ever bought, so instead of moving like we planned, we slept in the car for the next two months. And I told them how we moved to Seattle with that woman with two gold teeth and an enormous teenaged son who dressed in a yellow sarong and cried whenever anyone mentioned the last episode of M*A*S*H*, and how the son fell in love with you and used to follow you around and moon over you, and how we woke up one morning in the pullout and he was on top of you trying to force his tongue into your mouth, and how that same afternoon we caught a ride with that lady trucker who drove us all the way to Salinas, in part because she felt sorry for us but mostly because you were feeling her up and didn’t think I’d noticed.”

“You covered the bases.”

Plumber shifted from one hip to the other. The leg bindings were loosened now, but his wrists were still strapped to the bed. A protective measure only, to stop him scratching his eyes when the giant blue spiders crawled across his face.

“I thought the details were relevant. Like the time you left me at your mother’s place while you went to work down south on a series of commercials . . .”

“I was a crustacean. I was in demand.”

“And how your mother . . .”

“Your grandmother . . .”

“— used to wash my hair every night with lye soap and vinegar, and how she kept an autographed photograph of you in every room and gave one to everyone who came to visit her, and how when you came to get me you gave her a stack of autographed photographs and borrowed a hundred dollars from her. I told group a lot of things because that’s what we do in group and because I am coming to realize that these little details, these tiny particles of my life, collectively define who I am, while the larger arc, let’s call it the narrative or even orbit, really only establishes my relative position in space. My counsellor suggests I try to live more in the here and now: the particles. I am choosing to follow that advice. So, Father, you’ve never told me why you left her.”

“You see, I was working on a pilot with Jan Michael Vincent.”

“Father.”

“There were rumours swirling of work for out-of-work actors with Golden Globe potential . . .”

“The truth.”

“The truth?”

“Please.”

“The truth is that one morning I woke up and looked at your mother. She was still sleeping, and I looked over at her and thought how beautiful she was. She was the most beautiful woman in the world. And as I lay there looking at her, it struck me how I didn’t really know her. Really, we were man and wife, but we were strangers. And that frightened me. Not so much the fact that we were strangers — you get used to that — but the thought that we were perhaps growing less strange, that in fact over time we might no longer be strangers at all, but intimates. Not that the idea of being intimate with someone frightened me. It was the thought of becoming something other than what I was. That’s what frightened me. I never wanted to become anything. I wanted only temporary. I am, after all an actor. That is my fate. Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait point.”

“That’s your answer for everything.”

David Plumber Sr. looked at his watch.

“To become something, that’s too much like death.”

Dad looked at his watch again.

“Well, I must be going.”

“Goodbye, Father.”

“Goodbye, son.”

. . .

THEORY X. The speed of a heartbeat increases as its distance from the sun decreases

In line for dinner at the commissary that night, she was staring at him from behind a mound of mashed potatoes. She had an almost heavenly look of disgust on her face. Roy said, if looks could kill . . .

Plumber had been at the centre for five and a half weeks. He hadn’t had a drink for five weeks, and he’d never felt worse in his life. Plumber and Roy took their dinner in the solarium. Afterwards they went for a long walk in the exercise yard. They played volleyball by the pool until bedtime. And every time he looked around, there she was. The woman. Mrs. Charles Bukowski. Standing there, in the shadows. Watching.

COROLLARY TO THEORY X. E=MC²

I’m having an out-of-body experience, I think. I am asleep on the bed, or rather watching myself asleep on the bed. The woman is there. She’s strapped my arms and legs to the four-poster and begun to remove her pink housecoat. “You’re an ugly man,” she says. No argument here. “You are ugly inside, you’re ugly outside.” I couldn’t agree more. She removes her pink pyjama top. Her giant breasts sag to her belly. She takes off her bottoms, her belly hanging over her pubic hair. I feel myself getting hard. She climbs on top of me and plugs my cock inside her. Her breath is putrid, like onions and rotten eggs, her flabby body covered in oily boils. She rides me bitterly, joylessly, scowling, grunting, digging her dirty nails deep into my shoulders, and I wake up screaming from the pain, with her on top of me, riding me, her dry box holding onto my cock like an angry fist, and just as I’m about to come, the orderlies peel back the doors and enter. “Fuck you!” she screams at me as they carry her out. “Fuck you, you ugly, ugly man!” I couldn’t agree more. Fuck me. Fuck me, I’m an ugly, ugly man.

SUMMARY. All things are relative; conversely, all relatives are things

Understand, Plumber wanted to die. What he didn’t want to do was linger.

The Mardi Gras Detox Centre was a case in point. After six weeks — the recommended course of treatment — he was clean and sober. The alcohol had had time to work itself out of his system. He was saved but not cured. Every day would be a struggle. He was ready to go home.

They gave a party in his honour. Plumber was asked to say a few words. He declined.

Goldberg picked him up at the front door. A photographer snapped his photo stepping into the agent’s SUV. Plumber smiled and waved; Lilly had done it again. Plumber got in the car.

Goldberg had good news. He’d landed Plumber a plumb job on Santa Clara Nights. He would play the Contessa’s good and evil twin sons. It was a field day for an actor of his calibre. Meanwhile, he would still stay under contract to Levitz and Sherwood, who had no immediate plans to kill him off.

Plumber nodded. “Where’s Dad?”

Goldberg revved the engine of his BMW SUV. The giant station wagon lurched into action.

“I said, where’s Dad?”

Goldberg smiled and looked in his side-view mirror.

“Dad’s moving, baby. He’s going places, just like you.”

Plumber looked out the window. Rain had begun to fall, streaking the glass. He looked at his watch. He’d been out of the clinic five minutes, and already he wanted a drink.⁴⁹